Re: Getting Unstuck - How do you re-motivate yourself?
I\'m not offering and advice here, which would be the blind leading the blind.
It\'s all about motivation, and that\'s different for all of us. I haven\'t shot any personal stuff for a long time now and I think it\'s because I simply have no goal. I don\'t show my prints, I rarely post them, pretty much anywhere, I don\'t hang them on walls. Nothing. I shoot cars for magazines, and other work, so I\'m certainly shooting all the time but even that is demoralising these days as rates and publications vanish by the day. I joined a camera club a year ago and I think I\'ll start entering the print competion just to force me to get out and shoot some different stuff.
I\'ve always kept a notebook with ideas and it\'s so old now that it\'s actually starting to fall apart. I have lots of ideas that I think would make great images, or even entire projects or potential shows in a gallery. But it\'s one thing to have an idea and another to have the motivation and drive to actually make it happen. Talk is cheap.
We are driven by different things. I am not an artist. I have nothing to say so in a way I have nothing to photograph either. I\'m sick to death of compositionally perfect images, pretty pictures, that have no meaning. That was a challenging and worthwhile goal when shooting on film, ie getting it in camera, but in this digital world every image can be compositionally perfect, after a few mouse clicks. Not my cup of tea however.
If you do have a statement you need to make, or a cause to support then that might be the motivation you need to get you going. I found that motivation about 2 years ago for a very long term project that I started but I simply couldn\'t maintain the motivation. I must admit I hate sitting in front of a computer editing images and that was a big part of this project. I think that\'s why it kind of died, or maybe it\'s just in hibernation.
I love reading old photography books and find them great for inspiration and ideas. I hardly ever read books written this century, and preferably not even the last one but that\'s not easy. There was a proliferation of books in the 30-40\'s so there are lots of interesting books from that era. However the earlier books, the earlier the better, are fascinating to me. Carsten, if you find a cheap, but nice, copy of Leni Riefenstahls \'Schönheit im olympischen Kampf\' (1937) kicking around in a used book shop then please PM me! I\'m not kidding.
Strangely, I do love photography, reading about it, constantly learning new and preferably very old techniques, but I feel little to no drive to do it at present. Strange.
Good luck finding inspiration/motivation, and when you figure it out, please let me know.
JJ
Nov 19, 2012 at 05:50 AM
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